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authorArturo Espinosa <unammx@src.gnome.org>1999-11-10 08:18:14 +0800
committerArturo Espinosa <unammx@src.gnome.org>1999-11-10 08:18:14 +0800
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Small design doc
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+
+The Evolution Project specification
+Miguel de Icaza.
+
+
+* Introduction
+
+ Evolution is a project aiming at providing the free software
+ community with a professional, high-quality tool for managing
+ mail, appointments, tasks and other personal information
+ tools.
+
+ We want to make Evolution a system that addresses our needs
+ (the free software development community) and we believe that
+ by addressing our needs, we will provide a system that will
+ scale in the years to come for other users that are just
+ starting to use computers and the internet.
+
+ The main objectives of Evolution are to provide these powerful
+ features, and to make the user interface as pretty and
+ polished as possible.
+
+ Evolution is a GNOME application.
+
+ Evolution will copy the best user interface bits and the best
+ ideas and features found on contemporary groupware systems.
+
+* The overall organization
+
+ A bar similar to outlook provides shortcuts for accessing the
+ various resources managed by Evolution: mail folders,
+ contacts, tasks, journal entries, notes, messages and other
+ user-defined destinations.
+
+* User interface widgets
+
+** The ETable package
+
+ This package provides a way of displaying and editing tables.
+
+ Tables are displayed based on a TableColumn definition that
+ defines the layout used for the display. Table Columns can be
+ nested, and the package does grouping of information displayed
+ according to the criteria defined there.
+
+ This is used in multiple places troughout evolution: it is
+ used for the Mail summary display, for the TODO display and
+ TODO new data entry and for the address book.
+
+ Nesting in the address book can be performed on various
+ fields. For example, a first level of nesting could be
+ "Company" and a second level would be "Country" the result is
+ a 2-level tree that can be collapsed expanded and contains the
+ information sorted/grouped by those two criteria.
+
+ The user interface for this will be copied from Outlook: the
+ possibility of adding and removing fields with drag and drop
+ as well as grouping using drag and drop.
+
+* The Mail system
+
+** The Mail sources
+
+ The mail system will support 4 sources of mail:
+
+ POP3 (transfer to a local file).
+ IMAP
+ Local mbox format in $MAIL.
+ Local mbox format that have other delivery points.
+
+ On top of that, it will be possible to browse existing mbox
+ archives (and possibly other formats in the future, like
+ Mailbox and Maildir).
+
+** Storing the mail
+
+ Mail that gets incorporated into the system is stored in mbox
+ format, and summary files are provided for quick access to the
+ files. No modifications to the file on disk is performed (I
+ am not quite sure about this, perhaps we want to add the
+ status flags and some method for adding metadata to the mail).
+
+ Summary files are rebuilt on demand or rebuild if the mbox
+ file and the summary file have got out of sync.
+
+ A Metadata system that will enable us to attach information to
+ a message will have to be designed and implemented (enabling
+ users to add annotations to mails, and special keywords and
+ flags in a per-message fashion).
+
+** Virtual folders
+
+ Virtual folders will enable users to read/browse their mail in
+ new ways: by specifying search criterias, these folders will
+ contain messages that match the criteria given.
+
+ There is more information about this in the libcamel
+ directory.
+
+ We will index all headers from a message, and possible the
+ contents of messages and keep those on a separate file, to
+ enable users to query their mail database.
+
+** Mail summary display
+
+ The summary will be displayed using the ETable package, to
+ enable users to add a number of sorting criteria and various
+ display methods for the summary view.
+
+ The Outlook methods for displaying will be present on the
+ system.
+
+ Message threading will be supported in Evolution.
+
+** Message display engine
+
+ We are going to be using a combination of
+ libcamel/limime/libjamie to parse messages and render them
+ into an HTML buffer.
+
+* The HTML engine
+
+ The GtkHTML engine will be used to display messages, and will
+ be extended to support a number of features that we require:
+ internal handling of characters will be based on Unicode
+
+* The message composer
+
+ Regular features found in composers will be added: connecting
+ the composer to the address book, support for drag and drop
+ for including attachments, editing the message, archiving
+ drafts and archiving messages sent.
+
+ We will probably be extending the GtkHTML engine to support
+ editing of HTML text.